Discussion meeting (March 2010)

Date: March 2, 2010

Location: Linux Caffe

Attending:

Paul Tarvydas

Justin (Paul's son)

Vish Singh

Mark Bolusmjak

Brian Connoy

Abram Hindle

This was a general discussion meeting.

Vish's notes:

- Mark demoed his Scheme compiler written in Javascript: http://github.com/z5h/zb-lisp- based on Dybvig's "Three Scheme Implementations" paper- compiles Scheme not to Javascript, but to a representation suitable for execution upon a simple virtual machine- why write it in Javascript? for fun. Javascript is sort of an interesting language, if you pick and choose certain parts of it.- also, it's cool to have a compiler that can basically run on any machine (since we all have browsers)

- Mark: Git and Github are both really cool- Paul asked about the pros/cons of Git and distributed version control systems (DVCS) generally- Abram explained the fundamental differences between centralized and distributed version control systems- Abram: why the big fuss when Github goes down? by the nature of Git, it shouldn't matter.. you can pull from any copy of the repository- within DVCS, should one use Git or Mercurial?- Vish: Git is MacGyver, Mercurial is James Bond

- Abram demoed his entry to the Google AI Challenge (a challenge to produce a Tron AI)- didn't have a lot of time to work on it, was buggy but did ok- Abram: Common Lisp doesn't have a function to copy an array?- interesting: winner of the challenge analyzes his program

- Brian gave a demo of Visual Lisp in AutoCAD- a very limited Lisp, lacking features we have come to take for granted (such as lexical closures)- Common Lisp can interact with AutoCAD, but you lose some of the integration you get with Visual Lisp- Abram suggested writing a compiler from a modern Lisp to Visual Lisp